Texas Instrument Notes

I
do not like TI that much - their product portfolio is not easy to
understand. Their website is all over again asking me to confirm various
legal notices, export regulation and another lawyers goodies. Their CCS
based on Eclipse is slow, debugging has often some glitches.
Now the last thing that happens is that after a few years customer asked
to make a modification to a project. I have the development environment
archived, but the hell happens again.

Mainly due to
TI debugger. Official TI debuggers for MSP430 family are quite
expensive. At the time this project was developed MSP-FET430UIF was the
"one". Today you can not by it from distributors like RS components of
Farnell (they say it is not produced anymore). It could be bought from
TI.. maybe. Anyway I took the one from the shelve, that was used in the
meantime for other projects and found that its firmware was updated and
is incompatible with old CCS v.4. The firmware in the debugger is
updated quiet often. Mainly due to new products, which is annoying as I
do not change the product during the project. Nevertheless, the debugger
can not be downgraded from old environment as it does not see the
debugger at all. TI changed the USB VCP class of the device to USB CDC
class.

First I tried to download a new
MSP430-FET driver from TI pages as debugger was not detected in the old
environment anymore. During the install I ended up with installation
finished, but something was wrong

To
downgrade the FW I have to use a new version of IDE. My way out was to
download IAR 6.40 for MSP430 with updatetool.exe that is able to
downgrade the MSP430.dllv3 to MSP430.dllv2. But you know this means
downloading 470MB of installation, installing the software, registering
on IAR for at least free or eval license, running the updatetool
manually and of course it ended up wrong. The new VCP was not detected
by updatetool and the update was not finished. After another hot moments
I found Linux at least enumerates the device, I blindly run the old CCS
and it detected the debugger and "updated" the FW to the newer (pretty
old) version of FW.